The moment Ciera DeSilva set foot in Peru, she fell in love.

She was covered in dust, surrounded by heat and poverty in Chiclayo, a desert city of 63,000 people in the north of the country, but the 24-year-old Bermudian saw only the beauty of the people.

“I just found [them] to be so welcoming,” she said. “When I first moved here I had a host family for six months and they treated me like I was one of their own. I just felt right at home from the beginning.”

She went to Chiclayo in July 2013 as an intern with a child sponsorship programme, Chalice Canada. She had just completed a bachelor of science degree in international relations at Canada’s Mount Allison University.

When her six-month contract was up, she went back to Canada, her home since her family left the Island when she was 11.

She returned to Chiclayo a few months later to work for a Peruvian charity supported by Chalice Canada, Centro Esperanza, which aims to improve the lives of poor families in the region.

Miss DeSilva taught art and music to children from dysfunctional homes and helped with their homework. Because many of them worked, classes were held in morning and evening shifts.

“A lot of schools around here are terrible,” she said. “Often the teachers don’t care or even show up. Physical punishment in the classroom is common and often children are terrified to answer a question even if they know the answer. Very few schools have art and music classes or school libraries.”

She said that even after a long work and school day, her students were overjoyed at the chance to sit down and paint, colour or play music.

“They have all this creativity bottled up and are looking for some way to express it,” she said. “Sometimes they are hyperactive but concentrate when they do the art. They never want the art sessions to end.”

Some of Miss DeSilva’s students have sold art to bring in income for their families.

“The parents are so appreciative of what we do,” she said. “To them it is a blessing to have these programmes, because without them their children would be getting into mischief. The older teenagers would be getting into drugs or gangs.”

The shanty towns she worked in could be dangerous, but she said that when people saw her carrying art supplies or books they left her alone.

“They just think there’s that foreign lady with the art supplies,” she said. “They know how much these programmes are needed in the community. People are really welcoming.”

One of her tasks in Chiclayo was to take books to children as part of Centro Esperanza’s mobile library programme.

The books were a luxury they could not afford, and they were not widely available.

“They get so excited,” she said. “Sometimes we will lend them books and sometimes they just spend an hour with us reading.

“It is a really exciting project because they have so little access to reading. When you give the children books they go crazy. They love the pictures and words. They want to read them over and over again.”

While there, Miss DeSilva also found an outlet for her passion for music.

“I played the violin with the Menuhin Foundation in Bermuda when I was a child,” she said. “When I first got to Peru, every day I would walk to work and pass a music school. People promised to take me there one day, but they didn’t.

“One day I was going home and knocked on the door and told them I was looking for somewhere to play the violin.”

She played with a chamber orchestra until last November, and also performed in cafes and at cultural events.

Miss DeSilva became interested in travel while a student at an international high school in Vancouver. She went on a Rotary Club Exchange trip to Mexico and became even more passionate about exploring different cultures. She still considers Bermuda home.

“I was in Bermuda last year for my grandfather, Eric Benevides’s, funeral,” she said. “I love going back to the beach at Grape Bay in Paget. My grandfather lived near there.”

She said returning to Bermuda was a bit of a culture shock because everything seemed so wealthy compared with Chiclayo.

“Bermuda will always be in my heart,” she said. “I have lots of great memories of my time there. My twin sister Bianca and I got a great early education at the Bermuda High School for Girls. I have often thought back to the wonderful library we had at BHS. We were so lucky.”

Miss DeSilva is returning to Canada, where she is hoping to start a bachelor of science degree in education at the University of British Columbia. “I am still waiting to find out if I’ve been accepted,” she said.

Her goal is to develop her teaching skills to better help children in Peru. “It has been a dream come true to live and work in South America,” she said. “The blending of cultures and tumultuous history is fascinating and I love the Spanish language, although I would ideally like to learn a language such as Quechua, which is indigenous to this region.

“I love living close to the beach in a region with warm temperatures and an incredible amount of sunshine.”

• For more information, visit www.chalice.ca